If you know me, you know that I believe strongly in capturing content. I believe that within 20 years, humanity will be capturing most, if not all, of its content. To me, it's a shame that we produce content which then gets lost, only to be stored inside the heads of the people who where physically present. If we're ever to make a leap in learning past what each individual can experience, we need to have a collective framework where people can learn quickly by sharing in experiences others have had. In short, I believe it should be a basic human right to capture the content you've experienced, and share it with whomever you want.

To many people, that can be a very scary idea. What if someone is having a private conversation with you, and you capture and share it with the world? And although these are very real issues, to me, they are issues that can be solved. The benefit so far exceeds the cost of figuring these issues out that it's a no-brainer (see our experiences with Stargate as an example). In fact, there are opportunities for creative entrepreneurs to find ways of easing the world into the idea of capturing and sharing content in ways that people are culturally comfortable with and that maintain people's sense of privacy.

Today I had a typical experience that highlights how far we have to go before the capturing of content is accepted. I was attending GigaOm's session on AppTV, and setting my Kodak Zi8 camera up, as I often do, to capture the session. That's when Surj Patel of GigaOm came up and told me I couldn't record the session. When I asked him why, he told me to "fuck off". Pretty distressing attitude.

Today I attended the GigaOm Bunker Session titled "Is App TV Coming Next?"
If you know me, you know that I believe strongly in capturing content. I believe that within 20 years, humanity will be capturing most, if not all, of its content. To me, it's a shame that we produce content which then gets lost, only to be stored inside the heads of the people who where physically present. If we're ever to make a leap in learning past what each individual can experience, we need to have a collective framework where people can learn quickly by sharing in experiences others have had. In short, I believe it should be a basic human right to capture the content you've experienced, and share it with whomever you want.
To many people, that can be a very scary idea. What if someone is having a private conversation with you, and you capture and share it with the world? And although these are very real issues, to me, they are issues that can be solved. The benefit so far exceeds the cost of figuring these issues out that it's a no-brainer (see our experiences with Stargate as an example). In fact, there are opportunities for creative entrepreneurs to find ways of easing the world into the idea of capturing and sharing content in ways that people are culturally comfortable with and that maintain people's sense of privacy.
Today I had a typical experience that highlights how far we have to go before the capturing of content is accepted. I was attending GigaOm's session on AppTV, and setting my Kodak Zi8 camera up, as I often do, to capture the session. That's when Surj Patel of GigaOm came up and told me I couldn't record the session. When I asked him why, he told me to "fuck off". Pretty distressing attitude.
In fairness, he did come up to me to apologize later, but his attitude highlights how far we have to go before capturing content is culturally OK. I do understand that it's GigaOm's business model to put content behind a pay wall, and that's fine. I would argue that allowing audience members to capture some content would increase the subscriber base. It exposes more people to the brand, and a professional, edited recording will always be better and more engaging than a blogger with his flip-style camera.
I was disappointed by Surj's myopic view of the value of capturing content, and his aggressive response when I asked him why that was his policy. And I post this blog not to embarrass him, but because I believe in the importance of allowing people to capturing content. I'm sure some of you will disagree with me, and I welcome your comments below.
As an aside, I've had similar things happen before, where groups were surprised I wanted to capture content (never so aggressively, though), and those groups have literally thanked me later and said "you were right, it provided a lot of value to us that you captured the content" after they saw the increase in interest in their brand from the video.
Here's the video of Surj telling me to 'fuck off':

Buy three (or more) flight pass codes for $6.50 each, and sell them for more to passengers on the flight.

I like little exercises like this (like when I hacked a Vegas cab line), because being a salesperson is uncomfortable. Creating value can be a scary, anxiety ridden process. You have to talk to people you don't know, who aren't expecting to talk to you, and often whose first reaction isn't welcoming. You have to overcome all these obstacles and get them to see the value you're bringing.

That's why while making $20 off a couple of passes isn't a material amount of money, it's very material in the skills you need to use and hone to sell other, more expensive services or goods.

Audible.com has a very mature customer acquisition and retention strategy. I originally signed up for Audible after they sponsored of one of my favorite podcasts, This American Life. Audible was offering a free audio book, just to try the service. I decided to try it.

Little did I know that I was entering the Hotel California of software subscription services. I'm not upset with them -- it's more that I'm in awe of their ability to keep me as a customer for a year longer than I expected.

The reality is that Audible is expensive -- around $15/month to be able to purchase one audio book per month. After using up my free month, and then paying for two additional months, I realized I wasn't going to use it enough to justify the cost since I'd only listened to one audio book in a three-month span, and I went to cancel it.

Audible then offered me a deal: Just $5 for me to keep my existing credits for the next year. Since I had two audio books I hadn't read, I took the bait. But I never used those credits so when the renewal came up, I knew I really wanted to cancel.

Here's what the process was like when I just tried to cancel the account:

I just attended a fantastic, standing room only SXSW panel titled "Why Social Ads Work. Ignore Facebook Naysayers" with Kurt Abrahamson, the CEO of ShareThis, and Brandon Rhoten, the Director of Digital Marketing for the Wendy's restaurant chain. Both Kurt and Brandon spoke very openly about digital advertising, and social ads in particular.

Wendy's is a $9 billion company with over 7,000 locations in US & Canada (although only 150 locations in CA). Its biggest competitors are other QSRs (Quick Service Restaurants) like McDonalds and Burger King, but Wendy's is more interested in what newer chains like Chipotle are doing than these more traditional competitors, since Wendy's biggest business challenge is to have 20 and 30 somethings choose Wendy's over chains like Chipotle (Wendy's does very well with the older demographic, though, since it's a 60+ year old brand). The entire QSR industry is a $519 billion industry.

Here's the video of the event (sorry for the poor video quality; I was barely able to squeeze into the room)

Startups feel like a race against the clock, because they are. The trick is to extend a startup's runway (or as one of my investors put it, "oxygen in the the scuba tank") long enough to become successful. This means creating the right team, finding product/market fit, executing flawlessly, and either becoming profitable or raising enough money to keep oxygen in the tank until you do (or until you get acquired trying).

One thing I've firmly come to believe after doing several startups is that a startup doesn't die until its founder(s) give up. By that I mean, there's always one more thing that the founding team can do to eek a bit more oxygen from the tank, even when things look hopeless. But when a founder gives up, there can still be money in the bank and it won't matter; the startup is done. It kind of feels like the tail wagging the dog, in a way -- startups succeed from pure, raw determination of the founders as they race against time.

What got me thinking about writing this post, though, is an awesome blog post I read about putting time in perspective. So often in startups it can feel like time's running out that it's refreshing to think about time on a grander scale. Here's an infographic from that article that really does put things into perspective. A great quote from that article is:

I've written before about the importance of playing a computer like an instrument. Employing many small efficiency tips on a laptop will add up to copious amounts of time over the span of a year (let alone the span of your working life in front of a computer!) I've calculated that playing a computer as an instrument can literally create one week (about 40 hours) each year in efficiency gains. So learn these tricks and then take an extra week of vacation!

Now, to quantify a standard against which we can benchmark people's skill at playing a computer like an instrument, I'm challenging anyone to beat me in the F1 GeekSpeed Challenge.

Sue and I took a tour of the Tesla Model S factory in Fremont, CA today. This is the old NUMMI plant. If you haven't heard the NUMMI story between GM & Toyota, and you're a car buff, there's a This American Life episode about it that's just mind blowing. The net of it is that GM tried to learn Just In Time assembly practices from Toyota, they built a factory together for Toyota to transfer this know-how to GM, and GM completely blew it. The factory shut down and was sitting idle after that fiasco.

When Elon Musk was looking for a place to build his new Model S sedan, he approached Toyota with a $50MM bid for it, which Toyota accepted. Why would Toyota sell a car production plant arguably worth $1 billion or more for $50MM? For the answer to that, you really have to understand the relationship between Musk and Toyota, which is well portrayed in this 2010 WIRED magazine article.

As a reservation holder for the Model S, I'm proud to support one of the most amazing entrepreneurs of our generation. What makes Elon even more amazing is that he's not only revolutionizing the automobile industry, but the space industry as well, with SpaceX... at the same time. Elon, my hat is off to you.

Below are a number of pictures and vidoes of the factory and the event, which was very well done.